Existential Crisis-A Guide

True Freedom is the Mean between them

Screencaps from films - Rurouni Kenshin 1 and Tinimbang Ka Ngunit Kulang (Weighed but Found Wanting)

DISCLAIMER: I don't own either of these films.

Damn.

Pictured: a couple of Nazis lighting up a black man.

Joseph Campbell's Monomyth

From The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Joseph Conrad's The Secret Sharer- GAY COUNT

What I did with Blackwood, I now do to Joseph Conrad, Mistah Kurtz himself. Again, more decontextualization ahoy.

The story is about a ship captain's first time handling a voyage to on his own, until Leggatt, a sailor who escaped from his own ship, comes on board. Unnerved at first, the young ship captain is forced to hide Leggatt in his cabin, for lack of anything else to do, knowing full well the knowledge of a criminal on board could seriously threaten them both.

DISCLAIMER: I don't own the snippets of this book I have posted.

A Census of the Cook Family from Too Many Cooks

IT TAKES A LOT TO MAKE A-No, no, I won't. Being the obsessive person I am, I think I've seen Too Many Cooks about 50 times in the last week alone, combing it for Easter eggs. In my rewatches, I've compiled a list of all the Cook family members and their actors.

People without the surname of Cook are marked with an asterisk. Some surnames contain "Cook" but have variations.

Ernest Hemingway- Dissing James Jones

Damn, Papa went IN on this motherfucker.

Source: (http://books.google.com/books?id=SgKeQfmimJEC&pg=PA721#v=onepage&q&f=false)

Ernest Hemingway- Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech

No writer, who knows the great writers who did not receive the prize, can accept it other than with humility. There is no need to list these writers. Everyone here may make his own list, according to his knowledge, and his conscience. It would be impossible for me to ask the ambassador of my country to read a speech in which a writer said all of the things which are in his heart. Things may not be immediately discernible in what a man writes and, in this sometimes, he is fortunate. But eventually they're quite clear and by these, and the degree of alchemy that he possesses, he will endure or be forgotten. Writing at its best is a lonely life; organizations for writers talliate the writer's loneliness, but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness, and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone, and if he is a good writer, he must face eternity (or the lack of it) each day. For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning, where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment.  He should always try for something that has never been done, or that others have tried and failed, then sometimes with good luck, he will succeed. How simple the writing of literature would be if were only necessary to write in another way what has been well-written. It is because we have had such great writers in the past, that a writer is driven far out, past where he can go, out to where no one can help him. I have spoken too long for a writer; a writer should write what he has to say and not speak it. Again I thank you.

Ernest Hemingway- Stream of Consciousness Speech from the magazine snippets of "Banal Story"

I think this would make a great spiel.

Ernest Hemingway- Essay on War and Peace

Here is the book this was written for: http://books.google.com/books?id=8TckAgAACAAJ&dq=treasury+for+a+free+world

Courtesy of /r/Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway- QUOTES

This man is immortal precisely because of his aphorisms.

Ernest Hemingway- The Epitaph

Best of all he loved the fall
The leaves yellow on the cottonwoods
Leaves floating on the trout streams
and above the hills

The high blue windless skies
now he will be a part of them forever

Ernest Hemingway - Idaho

Ernest Hemingway- TRIVIA

Algernon Blackwood- GAY COUNT

Reading Blackwood, one gets the very distinct sense that he actually liked men. I'm not being a bigot here- whether he intended to or not, there's plenty in his work that could be constituted as "homoerotic." He often had several flattering physical descriptions of his male leads, and even longer descriptions of their closeness to other characters. This closeness of course, is only between two men. Despite some notable female leads (The Lane that Ran East and West, The Touch of Pan, The Empty House's Aunt Julia), the majority of his characters are men, and they happen to be men who are often in situations that have them get close with other men. Without further ado, let me give you some horribly decontextualized, eyebrow-raising snippets from his works to try and paint Algernon Blackwood as Anglo-American horror's LGBT representative. Of course, these examples could simply be my mind jumping to conclusions.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft- Short Story Summaries

And now, for the Horse Power Hateart version.

Algernon Blackwood- The Short Story Summaries

I'm getting rid of plenty of the literature I own that I've already read because that's the demand of me. Whenever I'm finished reading a short story by a great horror writer I really like, I write a short summary of it, so I won't forget what it was about. (Needless to say, by posting this here I am trying to forget about it.) I hope these summaries will be useful for anybody trying to find information about Blackwood.